Some distributed databases and file systems are notoriously finicky to operate; Ceph comes to mind in particular. Choice of technology and architecture matters here a lot. Content addressed storage using something like Minio with erasure codes should scale pretty easily and could be maintained by a small ops team. I personally know a couple of people that were effectively solo operations for 100PB Elasticsearch clusters, but I'd say they're more than a bit above average skill level and they actively despised Elasticsearch (and Java) coming out of it.